Sinclair Lewis

Born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, in 1885, Sinclair Lewis grew up as the son of a country doctor and carried that close knowledge of small-town America into his fiction. He studied at Yale and went on to become one of the most widely read American novelists of the 1920s and 1930s.

Lewis is especially remembered for Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, and It Can't Happen Here. His books mix humor, social criticism, and a keen eye for manners, ambition, boosterism, and hypocrisy, making him one of the great satirists of modern American life.

In 1930, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first American writer to receive that honor. He died in 1951 near Rome, but his work still feels lively and recognizable for the way it examines success, conformity, and the stories people tell about themselves.